February 2017 Blog Posts (9)

I’d like you to picture a scene. A father and son are hunched over their beers. They’re embroiled in a sometimes heated political debate. Strangely their politics are in complete alignment. Both are socialists. They are each sick of living in a society where greed and private profit…

For socialists in the Labour Party it will be a relief that the Blairite plan to stage two electoral disasters on one night failed. Nobody can claim losing Copeland was Jeremy Corbyn’s “fault”: the fault lies with the careerist right-winger who abandoned the seat in mid-session to take a…

The events that led to Donald Trump’s election started in England in 1975. At a meeting a few months after Margaret Thatcher became leader of the Conservative party, one of her colleagues, or so the story goes, was explaining what he saw as the core beliefs of conservatism. She snapped…

What’s the biggest event of our lifetimes, as far as political economy goes? ISIS, Brexit, the EU? No.

Today I came across a startling statistic: US life expectancy is falling to reach Mexico’s. It’s another confirmation: the US is going to be the world’s first poor rich country. That’s the biggest political economic event of our lifetimes: the unprecedented fall of a rich country, once the world’s richest, to become a…

With a few exceptions, virtually all of those at the meeting were PhD economists who had earned doctorates at MIT, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, and other top American universities. They met under the auspices of the Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC), the decision-making body of the…

ROME, Jan 24 2017 (IPS) - So far, Donald Trump’s first decisions as president of the United States have left no doubt that he intends to implement his electoral threats, while most likely not fulfilling the promises he made as a candidate.

Barely 48 hours after his inauguration as the 45th president of the United States, a shocking report was circulated saying that “A bill was introduced early January that calls for the removal of the United States from the…

It took corporate America a while to warm to Donald Trump. Some of his positions, especially on trade, horrified business leaders. Many of them favoured Ted Cruz or Scott Walker. But once Trump had secured the nomination, the big money began to recognise an unprecedented…

Mikhail Gorbachev thinks the world is “preparing for war”. What do you think? You’ve considered it by now, that much is certain. Let us try as best we can to answer the question: is the world gearing up for war?